No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.

Come indoors then, and open the books on your library shelves. For you have a library and a good one. A working library, a living library; a library where nothing is chained down and nothing is locked up; a library where the songs of the singers rise naturally from the lives of the livers.

Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning.

I often wish I'd got on better with your father,' he said.

Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.

At 46 one must be a miser; only have time for essentials.

I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.